Winter Steelhead In Transition

The river and its environs were cloaked in a white shawl. Ankle-deep snow buried the trail, making it hard to find in the dusky light before dawn. As the sun first winked at the river through the naked trees, a clear-plastic float was being abruptly ripped beneath the surface.

The morning produced 13 steelhead, mostly to the dripping litany of a late-winter thaw. Things began to warm incredibly fast. The river rose so quickly I was almost trapped on the wrong side, and certainly would have been had I waited another half hour.

The first 10 fish were crimson-banded, hook-jawed males, which are the rule in deep winter. As the urge to spawn strikes wintering steelhead, more females begin to arrive from staging haunts in lakes and estuaries. The last 3 fish of the morning were chrome-sided hens. By late afternoon, an afternoon which produced no steelhead, the ankle-deep snow survived only on the shaded north face of the hills, and the air temperature had climbed to over 70°F. The river was up and cloudy. Despite the 34°F water, steelhead were on the move, dissolving like the melting snow, morphing into ghosts in the limbo between life stages. It was a highly accelerated version of a transition that takes place every year, the fish all spawning and leaving the river within 48 hours.

Midwinter Transitions

Most anglers in the Great Lakes region know that winter steelhead are really summer- or fall-run fish that “winter over” in the river. These fish take on the coloration of stream rainbows, then begin to get even darker, sometimes turning coal black. When fish with color can’t be found in February, especially in a river that received a heavy fall run of steelhead, chances are quite high those fish are spawning or have finished spawning and left the river. Fall-run steelhead can spawn in water temperatures of 36°F or less. Because most steelheaders concentrate on the spring run, they tend to believe their biology books, which tell us that rainbows and steelhead (taxonomically identical, down to the last chromosome) tend to spawn most heavily in water temperatures of 40°F to 42°F. Which is true, for rainbows and steelhead in spring.

Fall-run fish don’t read biology texts. They can leave pools they inhabited for months and begin to stage near spawning habitat in 34°F water, covering their tracks along the way. When that wintering pool suddenly empties, even though the sky is spitting snow, chances are good that the weather is due to warm, and the sun is going to come out for long periods of time. Don’t ask how or why, but steelhead can predict local weather better than most meteorologists.

To find wintering fish, refer to last winter’s article (In-Fisherman February ’07), which discusses the makeup of wintering pools. Wintering pools tend to be dish-shaped and relatively shallow, or fairly deep containing current voids, or very slow currents. When steelhead leave these spots, time is of the essence. You have two weeks, tops. Late-winter steelhead can move into 33°F currents and reposition. The search then centers on deep runs, dish-shaped pools, pockets where current voids exist with broken water on top, and other areas with cover directly below spawning habitat. The key becomes finding the right spawning riffle, one of many quick, shallow gravel shoals in the river. Fall-run steelhead often spawn in the deeper pockets, grooves, and runs within and below these riffles.